> Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork.
Elastic loses nothing by pissing off AWS, this was clearly the right move. AWS has contributed very little to the project so far, so if they took their toys home in a huff it makes no difference to Elastic. And if AWS does contribute significant development to their new fork, Elastic is free to copy any worthwhile commits into the official repo under the terms of the license Amazon has released their fork under. The only thing Elastic is going to suffer for this is some people whinging on HN about whether or not it’s “really open source” anymore.
Just curious, have you ever operated Elasticsearch at scale? I haven't operated at the petabyte level but I have at the terabyte level, and everything I've seen tells me that this move is going to hurt Elastic immensely. They've forced Amazon to create the Elastic equivalent of postgressql/mariadb/jenkins ci.
What downside exists for Elastic from making this change? If AWS makes valuable contributions on their fork, Elastic will absorb them, but the converse is no longer true. If the downside is that the AWS hosted ElasticSearch service will become successful, well, that was happening anyway before the relicensing.
I don’t see a path for absorbing and relicense. Especially if the core code method signature diverges in the future. It is going to be a lot of trouble for Elastic to absorb non-trivial contributions from the fork.
Elastic loses nothing by pissing off AWS, this was clearly the right move. AWS has contributed very little to the project so far, so if they took their toys home in a huff it makes no difference to Elastic. And if AWS does contribute significant development to their new fork, Elastic is free to copy any worthwhile commits into the official repo under the terms of the license Amazon has released their fork under. The only thing Elastic is going to suffer for this is some people whinging on HN about whether or not it’s “really open source” anymore.